The 21st Century Brain

TITLE: JPpUzlVt-lg CHANNEL: Unknown DATE: ---TRANSCRIPT--- Hello, I’m Dr. Hannah Critow. I’m a fellow here at Mlin College, Cambridge University. I’ve been researching the 21st century brain and how we can all futureproof our minds in the age of AI. I would say no because embedded within our brains is this incredible mechanism called synaptic plasticity. If we skip back in our species history then similarly in the 21st century BC humanity was undergoing a big evolutionary shift. There was the widespread use of the written word. We were also using metals to develop incredible tools including weapons and we were starting to live in more city-like states. If we now skip forward to today, the 21st century AD, we similarly seem to have been compelled to develop incredible technologies that allow us to communicate with one another across the globe as never before. The invention of the internet, social media, even the development of artificial intelligent technologies that have been very much inspired on understanding of how our own neural networks operate to create human intelligence. We’ve developed these technologies that allow us to share our perspectives, share our knowledge across generations and across the world. And I would say that our ability to have this synaptic plasticity within our brain that allows us to learn from our environment to remember new things and behave in new ways so that we can innovate and problem solve and evolve into the future will again help us to thrive into the 21st century and beyond. Now, traditionally, societies and scientists really thought that our species success was underpinned by our ability to be logical, to reason, and to be rational. And actually, our emotions were this sloppy, hysterical thing that really we should try to control or quash or ignore. Increasingly, scientists and society are starting to appreciate how our emotions actually bring with them lots of layers of additional information and they can be used as guides to help us with our decision making. So, we know for example now that our emotional intelligence is the number one predictor for our life success and satisfaction levels. And scientists have increasingly been able to study this incredibly complex behavior of emotional intelligence and empathy. And we now have tools to start to measure it more precisely. And what we’re finding from the scientific studies is that emotional intelligence is not very heritable. So it’s got a heritability level of around 10 to 45%. meaning that the genes that we’ve been given from our mom and dad actually don’t play a big component in this complex behavior. Now, this means that our environment, the society we’re in, plays a big major role in shaping our emotional intelligence. And this also brings with it good news because it means that we can all enhance or elevate our emotional intelligence regardless of the genes that we’ve been given from our mom and from our dad. So how do we do this? Well, simple things like for example looking each other in the eye directly. We can also practice self-compassion. So spend time listening to our own emotions and actually trying to use them to help us to guide our behavior. We can also spend time reading fiction books which place us in other people’s worlds, help us to learn about other people’s perspectives and the journeys that they go on. And in fact, there’s medical schools in America that have introduced humanity classes that are essential for their students to help develop their emotional intelligence and empathy skills. We can even feed our emotional intelligence. There was a lovely study that was published recently where they took 100 volunteers and half of them they actually fed them with prebiotics and probiotics just for a small number of weeks and that helped to enhance their altruistic behavior. So they were much more likely to act with other people in mind creating a much more egalitarian state. Now leaders have to make sometimes very difficult decisions and it helps them not to be too swayed by everybody else’s situation. And unfortunately, as we’ve all seen, this can sometimes go too far in the wrong direction. Now, embedded within our nervous system are these very clever mechanisms that help leaders to make these difficult decisions. So, for example, if you’re in a position of power, your mirror neuron circuits, which are nerve cells within the brain that are thought to be involved in our ability to imitate one another and to have empathy for others. These nerve cells actually start to quieten down with electrical activity when people are in a position of power. Now, there’s a lot of information from the outside world and from the people around us that we don’t actually store within our brains. We store that knowledge within our peripheral nervous system and particularly from the nerve cells in the gut and in the heart. I don’t know whether you’ve ever had like a gut feeling about something or a heart flicker. That’s those nerve cells that live there, sending a little signal up via the vagus nerve, which is a cable or a bundle of nerve cells that runs all the way from those organs up to the brain and to a particular region called the insula, which is involved in monitoring the information from your body and also the knowledge and the people and the environment around you. And when you’re in a position of power, there’s a dampening down of that veagal nerve sensitivity, which means that you’re less able to take on board that knowledge from the outside world and use it in your decision-m. Now, is there anything that we can do to help combat this impact of power on the nervous system so that we can immunize its negative effects if you like? Well, yes, thankfully there does seem to be. So, for example, if we just spend 30 seconds every day doing some exercises to get our heart rate up, then spend the next 30 seconds listening to that strong heartbeat and really tuning into it. And if we do this for just a small number of weeks, it can help us to get into the habit of listening to our peripheral nervous system and listening to that collective knowledge, that wisdom from the outside world that’s being stored in that embodied cognition. We might be finding it increasingly difficult to think with clarity and precision. There is no doubt lots going on in our environment in the current day. However, there are some key ways that we can help our brain to focus and think clearly and not get overwhelmed. So, for example, making sure that we eat healthily so our brain is getting the nutrients that it needs and so that we’re not filling our diets with processed food that actually lack that nutritional value that our bodies and brains are sometimes screaming for. Also making sure that we sleep so that we can help to consolidate what we’ve learned from the day before into nice stable memories so that we can form new habits in behavior. And so we know that if we exercise regularly then that helps to create new nerve cells within the brain particularly the hippocampus which is a key region of the brain involved in learning and memory and helping us to navigate our environment. So that advice all seems very intuitive. It’s things that we all really know already to be true. But more recently, there’s some new neuroscience knowledge that’s coming out that can similarly help us to make the right decisions. As part of my research for the 21st century brain, I went to James Cook University to meet with Professor Zultan Scorny. He’s leading one of the world’s largest randomized control trials, looking at how our diet can influence our ability to think clearly and with precision. He’s looking at one extreme end of the spectrum for this behavior. And I met with some of the patients that are on the trial. They’ve been diagnosed with schizophrenia or bipolar. So conditions that are very much characterized by very chaotic, disorganized thought that might result in hallucinations or delusions and a difficulty creating reality. And he’s found that simply changing their diet can have a profound impact on their ability to think clearly and with precision, effectively removing their debilitating symptoms. It’s incredibly important for groups of brains or groups of people to work together well. And scientists have started to recently study exactly how that magic can happen in the brain. Now, if we hook up individuals to an EEG machine so that we’re measuring the electrical activity within their brains, we can see that the degree of brain synchronicity between the individuals in the team can actually be used to predict how well that group of people are working together. If they’re learning from each other, if they’re building consensus, if they’re having dissent but without conflict. If they’re allowing ideas to hop from mind to mind so that they can innovate and problem solve effectively, then you can see this within the brain. The degree of brain synchronicity, so those electrical traces lining up with each other between brains can predict how well a group of people are working together. So knowing this, is there anything that we can do to help boost a team’s performance via their brain synchronicity? Yes. So it’s simple things that again we know intuitively to be true. So if we look each other in the eye directly, that helps to boost brain synchronicity. If we do simple things like sing with each other, then that helps to increase brain synchronicity. And if we look throughout our species history, embedded across many different religions across the globe, we see rituals of chanting, of singing together, and praying together. Skills that help to boost that brain synchronicity, helping us to bond. We also know that exercising together helps increase brain synchronicity and as does being in a positive mood. And in fact, we can even predict within 30 seconds of a group of strangers coming together who’s going to be the leader of the group by looking at the degree of brain synchronicity they exhibit. So those that fall in line with others and sometimes lead that dance of brain synchronicity are much more likely to be the leaders of the group. Now, our brains, as clever as they are, they basically operate as prediction machines. So, they like to process information from the outside world and then predict what’s going on and then create an output, which is our behavior. Now, to put this in numbers, something like 11 million bits of data enters our senses every single second. It’s a vast amount of information, but we’re only consciously aware of something in the region of 40 bits per second. So, a huge amount of information we discard. We don’t prioritize and we’re not consciously aware of. And our brains have to do this so that we can actually keep up with reality. Otherwise, we might effectively just blow a fuse. So, in order for our brains to do this, we basically create shortcuts in our thinking. We use our past experiences to create a lens of expectation for how we want to interact and navigate through the world. This creates biases or assumptions within our brain. It creates shortcuts in our information processing so that we can function effectively. When you’re dealing with a new situation, when there’s a lot of uncertainty and ambiguity in your environment, your brain struggles to predict. It doesn’t really know what’s going on and it has to analyze lots of new data at the same time. And if there’s a lot of ambiguity or uncertainty in our environment, our brain has to work incredibly hard to do all the metabolic work in order to have the agility and the nimleness to think our way through this new situation. The one thing that we do know for sure though is that we can none of us predict our futures. We have uncertainty all the time in our environments. We don’t know what tomorrow will bring, let alone the next month or the next year. So, how do we increase our tolerance for it? Well, making sure that our nervous system isn’t feeling too stressed or fearful. So, for example, simple things like box breathing. Breathing in for 4 seconds and then exhaling for 4 seconds and tracing the shape of a box with each breath and doing a few iterations of that can help calm the nervous system. We know that a small amount of stress is actually quite good for our brains. It increases the flexibility or the plasticity in the brain. But chronic amounts of stress, feeling fear, feeling very much frightened of our environment can actually cause neurotoxicity. It strips connections in the brain and it can also in severe cases cause nerve cells to die. It can also decrease the rate of neurogenesis so that not as many new nerve cells are being born in the brain to help us to learn and remember in new ways. So it’s really important for us to approach uncertainty and ambiguity with feelings of possibility rather than fear or doom and see opportunity within these situations rather than simply being frightened. So we seem to have been compelled to develop these incredible technologies going back to the 21st century BC when the written word was coming into widespread use to nowadays where we have increasing numbers of technologies that allow us to share our perspective to allow us to share our information and our knowledge about the world with others. the internet, the development of social media, the development of artificial intelligence systems that allow us to troll through vast data sets and see patterns to change our perspective of the world and how we understand it. All of these technologies have arisen from the human mind. And all of them, I would argue, help us to connect on a deeper level. This ability of ours, this drive of ours to connect with one another seems to have underpinned our species success in the past but also in the future. And many researchers believe that we’re undergoing a massive evolutionary transition towards creating a hyperconnected organic computer if you like or a human hive mind allowing us to share our ideas and to innovate and to share our perspective and knowledge like never before. And I think amongst all of this technological developments, we have to really value our ability to connect with others on a human level. Two of the communities that I’ve been very much lucky to uh be involved in is the housebo community on the river cam and also the college community here at Mlin at Cambridge University. And there there is a real sense of human connection, of valuing each other’s intelligence, of being challenged by different perspectives, and actually helping to move our our thinking forwards. As a result,